I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.
From Jonathan Coe
I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!
But we are entitled to look for continuity in politics.
Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do.
The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.
Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.
But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control.
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.
It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.
As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?
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